I'm a fan of cryptocurrency but I don't think this is a great description of it. Its primary goal is finding a way to make transactions work, given that you don't want to involve a central authority. Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority. It's perfectly possible to create payment systems involving cryptographic signatures involving a central authority (with the downsides a central authority involves).
> Cryptocurrency works the way it works specifically because of that desire to work without a central authority.
The word works is doing a lot of work there. Every compromise, hack, scam, theft, and weird "oops I sent the crypto to an address that doesn't exist and now it's gone forever" incident screams for central authority. Even what we call Ethereum is a rage-quit to pretend the DAO thing didn't happen.
